Is the duration of the fade from one image to the next (or previous) a specified value somewhere in the pre-loaded settings, or is it just a function of how floatbox handles it? I wanted to see if the is any way that duration could be shortened.

Thanks for the quick (as always) response. It's not the time, as such. Rather, as it advances, if it goes from a vertically oriented image to a horizontal one (or vice versa), the somewhat distorted momentary expansion (or contraction) of the current image before showing the next image is a bit of a distraction (at least to me). Between similarly sized images the fade is not noticeable. It's not a big deal by any means, but I just wanted to see if it could be shortened somewhat to minimize the distraction of the expansion or contraction.

It's a great skin, and I posted my first album with it a few days ago. It's tempting me to switch from my long-favored Matrix, primarily for mobile device viewers.

I don't see any image distortion during transitions. The aspect ratio of the image never changes. It is very different from the image transitions in Matrix, however. Not sure which I prefer - it may depend on the material.

Still, easy enough to add a "transition" time setting to the skin. Next release.

The more I test the phenomenon (which is far more noticeable on images of people than of scenery or celestial), the more I think I may be asking for the wrong thing. I'm testing on Firefox, Chrome, and IE11 on my win 7 desktop, and Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on my Win 10 notebook. On some, the transition is smooth over the 0.6 seconds and the "distortion" during expansion/contraction is not noticeable. But on others when it quickly expands (or contracts) from one aspect ratio to another the effect on the departing image is very pronounced. Hence, my desire for a quicker transition may be self-defeating.

I posted a test album at http://rmeri.com/Neptune-Test-2/ with a few people images, each of which is a different aspect ratio from the previous one. See if you can see this phenomenon on any of them with any browser/device.

Looks smooth as silk on my machine. But I was just out washing the car, a mindless activity, and I was thinking about this.

There are a lot of "actors" in the process of producing image animations. The script isn't lighting up individual pixels on the monitor.

First, the browser is executing the Javascript, and how well that works depends on the browser and on the chip in your PC. On a phone, for example, a heavy script like Floatbox (it's trying to do a massive number of things) tends to be very laggy, even when it comes to accepting user inputs.

Then the instructions are interpreted by the browser, and they're not all using the same engine to do that. Again, different results on different platforms.

Then, instructions get passed to the graphics card, which is the final arbiter about which pixels to light up, and how. The needs of gamers have driven development there, and new cards perform much better than old ones. Finally, monitors don't all respond with the same speed to the instructions they're given.

On my new PC, these kinds of animations are noticeably different than they were on my six-year-old machine, even with an old script like Highslide JS.

Back when I first started messing with Highslide JS, I had a very old machine, and the thumbnail expansions were awful - what was supposed to take less than 500ms would take 3 or 4 full seconds. It was smooth, but slow as could be. Torstein made some adjustments so that the expansion completed in the expected time, but to do that he had to skip over some of the stages of the expansion if the machine couldn't keep up. It was then jerky, happening in discrete stages. There was no magic solution.

This is all a bit like the color conundrum. A person with a wide-gamut, carefully calibrated monitor agonizes over the colors in his images, and goes to bed happy. Then he visits his parents, and shows them his fine pictures. Alas, the folks have an $89 TN monitor, on which the colors depend upon how you tilt your head, and that's factory-set to mimic the lighting conditions on the surface of Mercury.

In any event, the next release will give you a range to play with, like 0.2 - 1.0 seconds.

Just for the heck of it I did the tests again to see which device/browser combos had the "distortion" and which (if any) didn't. On the Win 7 desktop, Firefox and IE11 were smooth with no apparent distortion. On Chrome, what happens is that the browser quickly changes the aspect ratio from that of the existing image to that of the upcoming image, causing the people that still appear in the existing image to appear very tall and skinny (if going from a high w/h aspect ratio to a low one) or appear very short and fat (if going from a low A/R to a high A/R). The effect is very pronounced.

On the Win 10 notebook, the Firefox was smooth, and the Chrome and Edge had the very pronounced distortion.

I think your explanation of the possible contributing factors pretty much jibes with what these tests show, and the bottom line is that changing the transition time is not likely to make all browser/device combos suddenly behave exactly the same. I'd still be interested in trying the transition time option if you do add it, but it should be a low priority for your time.

Already coded, both for Neptune and Saturn (which both use Floatbox). The UI layout already provided a convenient place for it, so that was quick, and the rest of it was about a three-minute fiddle. Took longer to update the user's manuals than it did to code it.

Well, at both 200ms and 1000ms using Chrome and Edge, the effect seems even more pronounced. At 200ms, some of the images responded more quickly than at the original 600ms, but some of them seem to take longer than the original (and clearly more than 200ms), but in any case the distortion is still very pronounced. With Firefox (both devices), the transition was very quick and smooth. I'll have to try it on other folks' machines to see how much of it is unique to my setup. The test album out there now uses the 200ms setting.

Fascinating. The dirty little secret of browsers is that Firefox has the best image-handling of the bunch, and has for a long time. Chrome's market dominance is a bit of a mystery - I use Firefox everywhere except on my phone, where the Chrome bookmarks are better.

It's truly terrible in Chrome at 200ms, yet just fine at 600ms. No telling what's going on under the hood. It would appear that the default value was chosen by the Floatbox developer for a good reason.

I returned the test album to the 600ms setting, but still using the revised version of Neptune. The strange transition with Chrome and Edge is not enough to discourage me from using Neptune. One of my primary viewers has strongly voted for Neptune over my long time favored Matrix, not only for mobile devices but for conventional PCs as well. I have so much invested in Matrix templates that I'm not sure I'm ready to abandon it yet.

My thanks for sticking with me in evaluating this unusual behavior of Neptune with a couple of browsers. It's been a really interesting exercise.

There's still a big mystery, here. Your test album looks awful in Chrome, with obvious distortion from one image to the next. But my standard demo albums don't exhibit that behavior in Chrome at all. And when I grab your project file and use exactly the same settings, I don't get the distortion at all, not even in Chrome.

Here's an album using almost exactly the same settings as your test album, with similar material (people). Try viewing it with Chrome.

(demo album removed)

There's something else happening here, but I don't know what it is. Try stripping out your custom cursor hack (and any other customizing you've done). That's the only thing I can think of that might be at play.

ETA: My test album is also flawless in Chrome with the transition dialed down to 200ms. No distortion, unlike your album.

rfm2 wrote:
I posted a test album at http://rmeri.com/Neptune-Test-2/ with a few people images, each of which is a different aspect ratio from the previous one. See if you can see this phenomenon on any of them with any browser/device.

The Slide transitions are distorted on an iPad, both in Safari and in Chrome.